


It never hurts to give thanks to the local gods, you never know who might be hungry

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Series: It never hurts to give thanks (Adora and Moist series) [3]
Category: Discworld
Genre: AU Character Death, Carrot as King, Multi, Temporary Character Death, The Trousers of Time, alternate pasts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:47:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25984624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: But something had torn further back in time. Like wallpaper when you only meant to check what was underneath.
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes, Moist Von Lipwig/Adora Belle Dearheart, Rufus Drumknott/Havelock Vetinari, Sybil Ramkin/Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes
Series: It never hurts to give thanks (Adora and Moist series) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1498361
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Goddess of The Century of the Anchovy

Adora Belle Dearheart tended to be the exception to truths universally accepted. These truths included such axioms as “the thing about angels” and “one god one avatar.” 

She spent her days making the Clacks work. The Grand Trunk Semaphore was the informational circulatory and nervous system of the Disc. It reached everywhere that shutters could be seen (at times with a telescope) from the next nearest tower. Some people refused to use it. Most people wondered how they had gotten along without it. Making sure everything happened and dealing with what went wrong was almost certainly more difficult than running a city, provided that that city was not, specifically, Ankh-Morpork.

Stories are warped by people the same way spacetime was warped by mass. Ankh-Morpork was so populous that sometimes stories happened inside out and backwards. 

Adora was content. She was enjoying her happily-for-now. 

She’d just been offered tickets to go to Genua for Olde Excalibur’s fifty-seventh Final Tour for sending a Clacks with the correct composition date for a vaguely obscure song. Olde Excalibur was a Musician Barbarian, not a Bard, he was very clear about that. He had been calling himself “Olde” since he was sixteen and calling every tour a “Final Tour” since he was twenty-nine. He had two tours a year, so she reckoned he was about the same age as the Commander of the Watch. Her tickets were for the weekend before Fat Lunchtime. She’d heard they ate alligator sausages in Genua and had long considered that they must be much better than what was sold on the streets of Ankh-Morpork.

Adora Belle Dearheart was the avatar of the goddesses Anoia and her previous incarnation, Lela. They were perpetually smoking, perpetually grumpy goddesses. The last thing she wanted was the intervention of something that would interfere with the conclusion of her story. Legends tended to end tragically, or at least messily.

She had made it home to have lunch with her husband when something in the world shifted.

It was a bit like an earthquake. A door had opened. But it had opened nearly a decade in the past.

“Does the air feel kind of staticky to you?” Moist asked. “Like before a thunderstorm?”

“There’s not a cloud in the sky,” Adora said.

They looked at each other and then, as one, said “Check the concert tickets!”

Adora retrieved the tickets from the drawer where she had put them. Of course the envelope had slid to the edge of the drawer and endeavored to jam the slides. 

She opened the envelope and looked at the tickets which now said ‘Town Musicians of Bremer.’ 

“That’s in Überwald,” Moist said, reading over her shoulder. “That’s no fun.”

“It was just an excuse to go to Genua anyway. Do you think we should sell them?”

“I think something bigger has happened,” Moist said uncertainly.


	2. Galoshes For Tuna

One of Ponder Stibbons’ many jobs at Unseen University was Reader In Invisible Writings. This job involved predicting from the texts of books already written, the texts of books that they would influence that might be written in the future. In one of these books that hadn’t been written, he discovered the blueprints for Galoshes For Tuna.

Why exactly a pair of boots had a blueprint rather than a pattern ought to have been more of a cause for concern, but Ponder was a wizard, occasionally an engineer, and never a cobbler.

The concept reminded him of the fish Rincewind had helpfully tried to return to the water on Roundworld. They had grown 

legs and had evidently made some use of them before leaving the water.

Part of the blueprint included a ‘wish assessor.’

Ponder did not have a very good reason to try to build Galoshes For Tuna, but he was between projects and the longer Ponder was between projects, the more willing he was to push boundaries no one had noticed were there.

It would probably have been alright if he had handed the boots off to a fish further upstream. One that had never fed on stories of kingdoms and duchies that lay mouldering under the swollen waters of the Ankh.

It was technically a trout. Or at least some of its ancestors had probably been trout. It had eaten lots of things at the bottom of the river and since it had been raining heavily, Ponder could actually see it near the surface of the water. It looked like a fish and that was what seemed important at the time.

Boredom can be a very dangerous invention in the hands of someone who wants things to make sense.


	3. Havelock’s Razor

Rufus Drumknott would have had some truck with Nuggan in his manifestation as the god of things like stationary and paperclips if Drumknott had not rather brusquely asked him to go away and leave him alone. In a way he had helped pushed Nuggan off the map. Dealt a blow in the lead up to the death of the god.

There is a notion that one should never attribute to malice what could appropriately be attributed to stupidity. This is known as Hanlon’s razor. This why people enjoy the work of B.S. Johnson and why Drumknott held no ill feeling toward Nuggan. The god was doing what he thought gods should do. 

Drumknott was not especially religious. His boss, Lord Vetinari, had _dabbled_ in his time as an academic theologian in a way that seemed almost unclean to Drumknott. He never prayed, never confessed, just read everything with a genuinely open heart and attended services out of curiosity. He seemed to have a soft spot for some of the religions he criticized most vehemently. Drumknott was certain the gods hated that. They wanted people to take firm decisions about religion. Vetinari, of course, had also read with an open mind and had made plans in his head about what he would like to do to the gods of most of them. With a blunt instrument.

Drumknott did, however, hope after an afterlife and Vetinari’s hope for the opposite was all the more reason to hold him close when he let him. To say Lord Vetinari aestheticized mortality would be an understatement. Drumknott had read some of his poems, which were unsettling. He saw an ending as the only hard edge. Life fades into existence and flashes out of it. Rufus saw the world in terms of rules that inscribed what was possible while Vetinari... well, Vetinari didn’t see the lines in the sand, he saw the space between them.

If the Patrician landed on any one spirituality, it was pick-and-choose veneration of a witch thankful for things like bubble bath and being able to focus on what he was writing. It was a testament to Ankh-Morpork that this rather random approach to religion was nearly universally viewed positively. 

But it certainly wasn’t requisite for actual witchcraft. What that required was paying attention and then acting on what you have noticed.

When you can feel and almost see what could go differently, the burden of choice weighs heavier. What goes wrong is unavoidably, inescapably your own fault.

Hume’s Guillotine states that “what ought to be cannot be deduced from what is”

Machiavelli’s Grindstone states that “what is” is so different from “what ought to be” that focusing on “what ought to be” proves ruinous.

Occam’s Razor states that “entities should not be multiplied without necessarity”

Havelock’s Razor states that “‘ought to be’ should be read as ‘make it so’”

Murphy’s Law states that “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” and it is worth noting that, at the time of writing, the compilation of philosophical razors involves neither physical razors nor talking guillotines and grindstones. 


	4. Swords and Spangler

By this point, Moist was expecting to be woken up by the Palace guards. They hadn’t been by in weeks, so the next crisis or brilliant idea was sure to present itself soon. 

They weren’t there when he woke up and the other side of the bed was empty, which was not unusual at this time in the morning, but it did not appear to have been slept in and Adora had certainly been there when he had fallen asleep. 

Moist’s mind, having just woken up, and being of the more anxious variety, offered the possibility that maybe she was gone. Maybe he had slipped into a reality where they had never gotten married. This was ridiculous, but the kind of think you think of at eight-thirty in the morning. 

He dressed in one of his more nondescript suits, not being able to find the golden one and headed to the Post Office. The Post Office looked normal enough. 

He went in through the front door. “Hello, everyone! How are we doing today?”

He was greeted with blank but friendly smiles.

A younger postman, if by younger you mean late middle-age, asked “Do we know you?”

Moist felt the blood drain from his face.

“I think we do! You’re Albert Spangler, the one the king pardoned.”

“The king?”

“It was a big story. He kept you in a small room with a dozen loud, buzzing flies for three days and when they let you out all the flies were still alive. Thereby proving,” the postman said happily, “that even under duress you would not hurt a fly.”

“Where’s Lord Vetinari?” Moist said, thinking that experiment could equally prove that he was very bad at swatting flies.

“Vetinari? Oh, him. Tolliver, do you know if Doctor V is back from Ephebe?”

“Doctor V?” Lipwig asked, without inflection.

“Oh, you know, Carrot’s Scorpion. Double-O Eight. His Majesty’s Secret Service. Worst poet laureate in history. Likes to get high and write about alchemy and the nature of time. Can’t say I really understand it.”

“This is Havelock Vetinari we’re talking about? The Patrician who succeeded Snapcase?” Moist said, feeling faint.

“Yes, he’s back in town,” Postmaster Tolliver Groat informed him.

“Mind you,” the younger postman, Wilson, Moist thought his name was, continued, “his wife hates that he’s working for the king.”

If he’d been drinking anything, Moist would have done a spit take. “His wife?” he spluttered.

“Lady Sibyl Ramkin. He didn’t have anywhere to go after crowning the king and she was already boarding the Captain of the Watch after the dragon blew up the watch house.”

“But why... I don’t understand...”

“Three people in a relationship is a little unusual, sure, but—“

“No, I get that,” Moist said, realizing how clever what they had done was. “Let me guess, she gifted most of the properties to Vimes resulting in massive tax income for Carrot’s government. Couldn’t have gotten that out of the Guilds in a million years, Vetinari didn’t need it because he did accounts with a scalpel, but Carrot did, and now Vimes owns the Ramkin estates.”

“Never thought about it that way. Shoring up the new government, huh?”

Moist looked up at Wilson, slowly and seriously. “Otherwise Carrot would have taxed heavily the people he was _able_ to tax. Kings can’t afford to turn the aristocracy against themselves. There’s not much gold in this city.”

“Not since someone stole it, buried it in the woods and then used it to buy a big house after being royally pardoned.”

Lipwig’s instinct was to feel incredibly, deeply guilty about this. He fought this instinct with the knowledge that it wasn’t something he had _actually_ done. Also if he’d bought the house for gold, the gold was presumably still in circulation and if it wasn’t, the fault lay with whoever he had bought it from.

“Who runs the Clacks?”

“Miss Adora Belle Dearheart, of course.” 

Moist breathed a sigh of relief, thanked Wilson, and fled.

He wasn’t sure where he was going. If Adora in this world thought of him as a criminal without contrition, he didn’t think he could face her. 

He found his way back to Scoone Avenue and looked up at the big house on the opposite side of the street to the one he lived in. Vimes lived there. In this world, presumably, his hatred of Moist von Lipwig, pardoned or not, ran deeper than a canyon. 

But he wouldn’t hurt him. He trusted that. He might yell or speak terribly calmly and Lipwig would flinch, but he wouldn’t hurt him.

He knocked on the door. Wilikins opened it with an expression of distaste. “Spangler?”

“Postmaster Groat said Lord Vetinari was home.” He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘Doctor V.’ He blushed just thinking of the name. The man was _ridiculous._

“He’s in the garden.” Wilikins made a different expression of distaste. “Writing.”

In the garden, Lord Vetinari, wearing shorts and a long-sleeved shirt, was sitting on a blanket, in half lotus, his foot resting on a thigh, the pale olive skin mysteriously devoid of the puckered, raised scar tissue that Moist knew to be there, since in the summer heat his Lordship was not trousers’ greatest fan. 

How far back had things shifted?

“The moon was a ghostly... Bireme or trireme, which do you think?” Vetinari beamed at him. 

“Uh. Neither.”

“You’re probably right.” Vetinari made a tick mark on a blank piece of paper he had taken from a pocket in the shirt. “How may I help you, Mr Lipwig?”

Moist blew air out through his mouth. At least someone knew he wasn’t Albert Spangler. “How did Carrot become king?”

“I put a crown on his head,” Vetinari said placidly. “He made it himself. Dwarf tradition, you know.”

“But why—“

“I was quite deep in a depressive episode, to be honest with you. People had made it clear they did not want me around and after Wonse nearly killed me I did not trust myself. I didn’t think I was good enough. By good, of course, I mean talented. I believe I am a bad person who tries to do good things and I did not think I would survive the next unofficial assassination attempt.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Moist said, glancing at the back door of the house that led out onto the garden. “I don’t think you were the one you were underestimating.”

“Ah, Vimes.” Vetinari smiled, “That was a courtship and two-thirds. Especially because Carrot seems to have some kind of glamour I can’t escape.”

“A glamour? Like an el—“

“Like the Lords and Ladies, yes. I cannot say no to him. I have three main theories about that. One, the malleability of my convictions. What I believe is subject to change based on evidence. The evidence Carrot presents is that what Carrot wants you to do are good things because Carrot wants you to do them. Two, republicanism, though I believe in it, was not deeply rooted in my psyche at an early age. Genua was steeped in fairytales during the years I lived there and they were only kept at bay by the Baron and Lady Gogol, who were the rulers at the time. Three, kings have a history of hunting witches. There may be an unconscious self-defense that I have not learned how to override.”

“Do you worry about that?”

It was like watching a storm cloud come over the horizon. “Dwarves lack legal protection if they present femininely. The undead are embattled and trolls marginalized. No one had enough time to challenge him before he became king, you see. I try. I try every day.” 

“And when it doesn’t work you come out here and trip on psychotropics and write about sexy highwaymen.”

“I am genuinely in despair.”

“I can see that. Does the Commander have any leverage in the palace?”

“The Commander? You mean Captain Vimes?”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m a sort of go-between for the Palace and the Watch.”

The thought of Vetinari being anything other than the puppet master made Moist’s head spin. A go-between? A sort of messenger? 

“Lord Vetinari?”

“Mmm?”

“Can you tell where people have been by looking at them?”

Something Moist had noticed about Vetinari over the years was that his hands moved a lot when he was thinking. He was often playing with something, papers, paperweights, letter openers (which were of course just ordinary deadly knives). He was relieved to see this Vetinari twirling a flower stem between his thumb and forefinger so the top of the flower looked like, well, a top. 

“You came from a long way away, Mr Lipwig. And right here. You went to sleep in a house on this street built for the enjoyment of stolen fruit. Most of it stolen long ago, but,” here Vetinari smiled. “Your wife could probably stand to pay the goblins a bit more.”

“Gött sei Dank,” Moist breathed. So he hadn’t gone mad.

Then the smile crumbled and Vetinari sat back, wrapping his arms around a bony knee. “You must be very disappointed in me for putting a literal-minded teenager on the throne.”

“Do you think I should go talk to him?”

“The King? Sure. You’ll probably be fine.”

“Well, ciao. Enjoy your... whatever.”

“I’ll try.”

-

Two hours earlier, Adora Belle Dearheart had shown up at the house opposite the one she thought of as her own.

She had stormed into the house and explained to Vimes she was from a parallel universe where she was married to Moist von Lipwig, formerly known as Albert Spangler, and he was the Postmaster, Deputy Bank Chairman and in charge of the government’s stake in the railway. If Vimes saw him he was to tell him to go to the palace.

“The Palace?” Vimes had asked in some confusion. But Adora was gone, leaving a trail of smoke in her wake. 

-

The Palace appeared as it had in Moist’s own world, if anything slightly overgrown, as though King Carrot drew less comfort from poorly planned topiary that its previous occupant. 

He nodded to the guards as he entered. They were the usual guards, large, confused, each one probably capable of removing four people from the premises at once. They seemed to recognize him. 

Moist climbed the stairs up to the Oblong Office unimpeded. Three quarters of the way up he realized he was going the wrong way and went back down to the landing that led to the throne room. 

The King was seated, not on the rotted-through gold-leaf throne of Ankh, but on a decade-old scone perched on the small wooden chair at the foot of the throne.

The chair looked too small for Carrot, especially in the ermine robes of state, being one of the chairs from the palace kitchen that was traditionally dragged out whenever something like a knighthood or the creation of a lord or staring at the vaulted ceiling at three in the morning meant Vetinari needed somewhere to sit in the throne room, but the scone was clearly the important part. Moist suspected that it was chemically indistinguishable from the Scone of Stone.

“Good morning, Mr Spangler,” the king said graciously.

“It’s Lipwig,” said Lipwig, immediately forgetting what he had come to the palace to do in the face of Carrot’s beatific smile.

“Yes, I thought it might have been at one point. How can I help you?”

Moist racked his brains for something he could ask for. The king so clearly wanted to help. He was a good king. He made things better. Moist felt like fog was seeping in through his ears. The king was good. The king was right. What was he doing? Why was he here?

He grappled for what he knew to be true. The city was meant to change. It was meant to move forward, not retrace the same steps. A king would keep it locked in a dance. Something as simple and tightly plotted as a waltz. Simple did as much harm as good. Even good did harm. 

“I’m glad I was able to find reason to get you out of the prisons after so many years,” Carrot said, not unkindly.

Prisons. Plural. Years. Plural.

“Vetinari, you bloody coward,” Moist muttered under his breath.

Behind the throne the plate-glass window exploded. Someone threw herself on top of Moist, shielding him from the explosion. He was conscious of grey wool fabric and shellacked hair pressed against his face. Then he was conscious of nothing.

-

YOUR MAJESTY, Death said, raising a sword.

“What was that?” Carrot asked, trying to avoid looking down at his body run through with several pieces of glass and splintered wood.

LEONARD OF QUIRM, I’M AFRAID. HE HAD NO ONE TO UPDATE THE TRAPS FOR, SO HE FORGOT ABOUT THEM AND LEFT THE PALACE.

“Is he—“

LEONARD IS FINE. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND...

“What will happen?” the crown on the head of Carrot’s specter seemed to be fading faster than the rest of him.

YOU GET THE SWORD.

“Do I have to?”

YOU SHOULD HAVE REFUSED THE CROWN.

“It’s the oddest thing,” Carrot’s voice was fading. “I’m almost certain I did.”


	5. The Sto Helit Federation

Moist and Adora Belle woke up on the street several blocks from palace. 

The Great A’Tuin swims through space at roughly a thousand miles per hour.

They hadn’t moved through space, only a few seconds through time.

But something had torn further back in time. Like wallpaper when you only meant to check what was underneath. 

Moist opened his eyes. “Spike!”

“Slick,” Adora said.

“I wish.”

“You’re my husband, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I certainly hope so.”

“Which goblin has the Patrician offered a knighthood to?”

“Of The Twilight The Darkness,” Moist said.

“Oh, it is you, I’m so glad. I thought maybe I’d ended up here alone,” Adora kissed him. “Are you alright? Not injured?”

“Where _is_ here?” Moist wondered after Adora had climbed off of him and he’d been able to stand up.

There were soldiers in the streets. Or maybe they were guards. It was hard to tell. They had blue plumes in their helmets.

Moist gnawed on his thumbnail. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

“It was enough of a shock to find a king in the palace.”

The city of Ankh-Morpork now stood under the banner of the Sto Helit Federation. 

The Duke had used the Assassins Guild as the ladder by which he ascended and they were only too happy to help take down Lord Snapcase. 

The Watch, such as it existed, had been incorporated into the Ducal Guard at the behest of one such assassin.

Moist von Lipwig saw the banners flying over the Palace. It was always an ugly building, boxy, with thick stone walls, architecture’s answer to the paper pulp shoebox, but Vetinari’s gardeners had treated it like an ancient Brutalist ruin and trained carbon-fixing plants to climb the walls in rigid geometric patterns.

Now it was painted with goldish. 


End file.
